By now, you all know the news: the Braves traded Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton, Jr. to the Padres for Cameron Maybin, Carlos Quentin, prospects Matt Wisler and Jordan Paroubeck, and the 41st pick in the 2015 draft. It was a salary dump and a decent prospect haul, and as such, it fit in perfectly with the offseason.

It has been one hell of a winter. With the exception of one bizarre off-key note — signing hometown boy Nick Markakis for $44 million — the modus operandi of the new front office has been to sell Frank Wren’s roster for scrap. There were 29 players who collected at least at least one plate appearance for the 2014 Braves; only 10 are still in the organization.

There’s no doubt that the farm system looks better today than it did on September 22, when the Braves canned Frank Wren. And they clearly expect it to look even better in two months, as John Hart told DOB: “We look up at the June draft and we’ve got five of the first 75 picks this year within this draft, and obviously we’ve made some changes within that scouting staff and we feel this is going to be a home-run draft for us.”

Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that a lot of what motivated the offseason moves by the Braves, and the three Johns in the front office, was spite against Frank Wren, and what they viewed as his terrible decisions that got the team in the morass in which they ended the season. They didn’t just rip off the band-aid; they amputated about five limbs. And they took what was almost certainly a playoff-contending team — a core that had won 96 games in 2013, that they had spent $300 million extending in 2014 — and blew it to hell, betting that a boatload of new prospects would be enough to get them back to being more or less as good as they were before they tore everything down in the first place.

The two keys to the Kimbrel deal were getting rid of Upton and getting back a good prospect and a high draft pick. The Braves haven’t acquired any no-doubt blue chips this offseason, but they’ve gotten a lot of players who strike prospect-watchers as mid-rotation starters, good relievers, league-average position players, and the like. It’s a good mixture of high ceilings and high floors. In the coming years, a lot of them will turn into pretty good major leaguers, and they’ll all be cost-controlled and cheap, which obviously was the whole point in the first place. (In this latest deal, they also got Carlos Quentin, whom they immediately DFAed, and Cameron Maybin. Neither of them really matters; they were salary dumps. Unlike the usual practice after a trade acquisition, I’m not going to write either of them up.)

It will be sort of interesting to see how Fredi approaches the season: there will be a lot of opportunities for proactive “Managing,” things like platooning and breaking in rookies and building a bullpen from scratch and figuring out whether Mike Minor’s salvageable or whether he’s just turned into hamburger meat. But it’ll be a lot harder for a lot of fans to approach the season. It was a cold bean-counter’s slap in the face, a naked announcement that the team had no interest in even attempting to win, and the strategy of dumping salary and hoarding prospects is rational if you have no money, but is hard to justify if you’re a cable billionaire.

Anyway, I’m angry but I’m still watching, and I think that’s reasonable. I miss Jason Heyward and Craig Kimbrel tremendously. I think I watched most of the games that they ever played, which was a tremendous privilege. Whatever happens the rest of their careers, I will wish them well. After Jason and Justin were traded relatively early in the offseason, it was a lot easier to bid farewell to the rest. But it’s still going to be a miserable season, and there’s only so much excitement I can draw from wishcasting 24 months into the future.

Baseball is back, finally. Let’s hope they never do that again.

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347 comments on “Goodbye To All That”

I hate the trade. The only thing I like about it is it will end all the incessant ‘trade Kimbrel’ posts here, and blog pieces throughout the Internet. The July trade deadline, if the Braves had Kimbrel and sucked, would have been insufferable.

The thing is, even with our newfound $$$, I’m not sure who we spend it on when it’s contending time.

You’d like to think the infield (Freeman, Peterson, Simba, Rio, Albies, Peraza, Bethancourt) would be relatively taken care of as well as the rotation (Teheran, Wood, Miller, Wisler, Folty, Banuelos, Sims, Jenkins, Hursh, Fried) and bullpen (the aforementioned who don’t stick in the rotation).

Really, where you could see us spending money would be in the OF, and over the next two years, as far as I can see, the only real difference makers that are set to hit FA are.

2016: JUpton or Heyward, and a tier below in Cespedes or A. Jackson.
2017: 30 year old Carlos Gomez stands out, with 35 year old Jose Bautista or 33 year old
Alex Gordon a tier below.

In 2018 things open up, but I’d imagine a lot of those players sign extensions before then. Unless we go for broke with Gomez, patch things up with Heyward, or risk Upton’s K rate increases into his thirties, I’m having trouble seeing how we leverage the extra money into 1st Division talent where it seems foreseeable that we’d need it.

Guess you can always make trades, or one of the OF prospect lottery tickets hits, but just because we have money, doesn’t mean we should be stupid w/it…(SEE Upton, M).

Prospects are good, but this trade was, above all, a cash dump. I am only okay with the swap if the cost savings is re-invested into the team, whether through Cuban signings, trades or smart free-agent pickups next offseason. It is only fair to reserve judgment until then.

If the team does not spend every last dollar of what it saved in this exchange by 2017, it’s on Liberty Media. And if Liberty doesn’t hold up its end of the bargain, fans are justified in abandoning the team until it is sold. (My fear is that Liberty will not re-invest it all, and instead of blaming its penurious tendencies, will point the finger at fans via falling attendance and TV ratings, which will crater during this Category 5 $#!^storm of a season that is about to hit.)

In all fairness, I think hart picked up good pieces in return. He got teams to turnover very good prospects for our players. I think the homeboy signing is for hart to tell other GMs that he is willing to keep his players to compete.

Hart traded about three and a half dollars and got back a lot of dimes and quarters. As Alex said, it makes sense to dump salary and hoard prospects if you’re broke, makes less sense if you’re run by a corporation with a market cap of $500 billion or whatever it is. This team is about to plunge into irrelevancy for a long time but no one is going to be held accountable because “rebuilding”.

It would also have been nice if we’d gotten any semblance of hitting back but instead it’s all pitchers who project as 3s or 4s. Awesome.

“Part of what I want to tell you is what it is like to have an offseason in Atlanta, how six months can become eight years with the deceptive ease of a film dissolve, for that is how those months appear to me now, in a long sequence of sentimental dissolves and old-fashioned trick shots—Jason Heyward dissolves into Nick Markakis, I enter a revolving door in October and come out in April a good deal older, and on a different street.”

I never thought they could get rid of Melvin’s salary. The Braves get a couple good prospects and a draft pick. I don’t know anything about Maybin’s ability to contribute, but maybe he can be moved at the deadline. Kimberly was not going to make this a winning team in the next 3 years. To me it’s a good deal. I tip Fredi’s cap.

They can still in theory claim that they can contend this year because they have ML caliber closers in Grilli and Johnson. They got themselves a starting second baseman, a starting centerfielder, and a starting pitcher plus a bunch of prospects. I am sure they will continue to say they are trying to rebuild and content at the same time.

the Extreme Value Theory – predictions(no, not Nate Silver, some other guys) on how long some of Baseball’s most hallowed records will stand before they are broken…

an example…the best batting average in the majors last season (.341) would require one extra hit every three games to beat Lajoie’s .426 … there’s a 50/50 chance that will happen in the next 250 years…

I just don’t agree at all that the moves were motivated by spite against Wren. Seems to me they just didn’t like his direction and have chosen a different direction, so they’re making the changes they need to make to make the direction switch. They’re trying to make the Braves better, and I don’t think Frank Wren plays into the motivation for that at all.

That would be funny. “We have designed new uniforms that will make the players better. The lack of names on the back will help them run faster…yeah, that’s the ticket! Who are these players? Well, come to Turner Field and find out!”

I’m sure you’re right. I’m basically just paraphrasing Mark Bradley, who wrote, “It has been clear from the day of Frank Wren’s “termination” that two of the three Johns — team presidents Hart and Schuerholz — hate every single thing the former general manager ever did.” I imagine that he was overstating the case, like I was. But everyone currently running the team was with the team while Wren was here, and so they had every opportunity to object then. The thoroughness of the teardown has been kind of stunning.

Frank Wren made multiple millions of dollars per year from 2007 through 2014. If the price he pays now for that 15-20mil in the bank is being the scapegoat for bad results, well, man. Life must be very tough.

But everyone currently running the team was with the team while Wren was here, and so they had every opportunity to object then.

This is the part that makes me wonder why/how the Braves got into a situation where such a drastic change in direction was needed. I understand why they’re making bold moves to build the farm at this point, but it really take until last season to figure it out? Perhaps Sam’s on point with Wren as the scapegoat. They needed to change and firing the GM is part of the narrative. I have figured (and Spike too) that Fredi’s going to end up in a similar role.

I understand the reasoning for the offseason, and even agree with it as far as it goes. But this is the first year I can remember where I haven’t been excited for the baseball season starting, and that’s incredibly depressing. The rebuild had better be worth it, because it’s making me enjoy one of my favorite hobbies less.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the wheels didn’t come off until spring, 2014. Prior to spring training last year, it was still spinnable internally. “Uggla collapsed faster than expected, but we think Melvin will bounce back and be a good CF for the rest of his deal, and we’re set with a super cheap starting staff with Medlen being our only “expensive” starter…”

Then Meds and Beachy both broke in the same week, and the Braves went from having two corner OF holes to sort out in 2016 (Upton and Heyward) to having both of those plus a #1 and #2 starter vacancy to fill. And they had nothing in the minors to sort that problem out. And then Melvin joined Uggla on the unsalvagable list.

Yeah, this is why I wanted the entire front office gone. The Johns are gonna act like this was all due to that evil Wren guy, and nobody should fall for that bs. We had a team full of young stars and now we have a team that won’t be competitive for ten or more years. I’ll watch because I love the game, but this is going to test the depths of all our fandom.

I think you guys are way to sure of how much input on day to day “the Johns” had during Wren’s tenure. We know Bobby essentially walked away rather than deal with Wren’s personality. And John Hart wasn’t hired until 2013 (after his contract with the Rangers expired.) Basically, that hire and the fact that Schuerholz felt he had to hire someone other than Wren to get the extensions of Freeman, Simmons, et al done, was the first tolling of Frank Wren’s death bell.

From 2007, John Schuerholz gave Wren the reins. Bobby Cox retired. In 2013, JS felt he needed to hire John Hart to do half of Frank Wren’s job, and by 2014 he decided that he and Hart might as well do the other half while Copallela matured into the role (and didn’t take the PR hit of trading fan favorites like Jason Heyward and Craig Kimbrel.) And when they fired Wren, Cox came back out of retirement to work with the team again.

@28 – I think the apt analogy is a house of cards. Wren was still stacking cards and it was still standing in February of 2014. By April 2014, two primary foundational cards – Medlen and Beachy – were gone. And when they went, the absence of anything past Alex Wood in the farm became a lot more glaring of a problem. Yes, he got lucky with Aaron Harang on a flier, and dumped a year of 12m per into Ervin Santana, but after that (and the collapse in 2014 regardless) he had four major holes to fill, a budget to fill maybe one of them, and nothing in the pipeline to even remotely help out. (David Hale was the best option.)

And another year of “your massive contracts all suck.” Wren now has on his resume the three worst contracts in Braves history; Lowe, Uggla and Upton, Jr.

Who hired Wren? What on his resume outside of running the Orioles into the ground said “we need this guy”? Too late for the blame game now I guess. The same dudes that signed Markakis are gonna fix this.

Though this thread’s title is suitably elegiac (a nod to Robert Graves and his experiences in WWI?), I’m optimistic about the Braves. I’ve seen players hit more up the middle and to the opposite field than I can remember in recent years. In particular, Andrelton seems to be improving his approach at the plate. Jace Peterson shows real promise as a second baseman, much more than LaStella ever did.

We can’t expect this team to blast the ball out of the park. They are gonna have to scratch it out, play smarter. And, so far, they’ve shown that they can do that. I don’t expect them to win a Wild Card spot, but they can end the season above .500.

The front office turnover seems to be largely on the scouting and player development sides, from what we’ve been able to see. I think it’s reasonable to expect improvement on that front (which would be huge), but as to the filling of major league holes… well, I guess we’ll see in 2017.

It truly is curious that the front office has routinely thrown around the line about not rebuilding, but it’s a good thing in the end that they are at least heading in one direction. The Markakis signing vs. the trades seemed like trying to have it all, which is rather impractical. The scapegoating of Wren has long rubbed me the wrong way. You can’t extend him one year and the next suggest that he destroyed the club’s farm system and didn’t buy into the “Braves way.” It’s painfully absurd.

All that said, this was John Hart’s best move since replacing Wren. He got everything he wanted from the Padres to make this trade happen and didn’t have to send a cent to cover Melvin’s contract. Bravo on that.

I was a fan in the 80’s, and here are a few opinions nobody asked for:

1. Bandwagon fans suck – sure we may not be good this year, but if you are a fan of Braves baseball there is plenty to be interested in for 2015. Watch Simba’s glove and see if he can change his approach, how good can Shelby Miller be, is Bethancourt an MLB regular, how does Fredi manage these platoon opportunities, how does the farm develop, and will the Braves’ strategy of going after TJ rehabs work. There’s tons more, and if you bail on this team because it won’t be good this year, you are a bandwagon fan and you suck.

2. The blame game with Wren and the Johns misses the point – this team is taking a very different strategy following last year. Will it work? I don’t know but it’s totally entertaining to me.

3. My new test for stupidity is how people talk about the Markakis deal.

Also, while I think @30 is a reasonable point, I would counter with this:

Schuerholz was and is the president of the team. That doesn’t mean that he should meddle, but it does mean that he should be held responsible for what his employees do on his watch. The case that one would make for Schuerholz to fire Frank Wren is almost identical to the case that one would make for McGuirk to fire Schuerholz.

I haven’t watched one spring training game, haven’t looked at one game result in the paper, have not studied the roster, have minimal enthusiasm for this baseball season (which is rare for me). I can’t even get it up to discuss how we got here & why we’re here.

As it relates to the Braves, I just think of that scene at the end of “Jackie Brown” where Sam Jackson (Ordell) & Robert DeNiro (Louis) are trying to figure out how Louis got tricked & ripped off by Pam Grier (Jackie Brown).

Ordell: I don’t wanna hear no excuses!

Louis: I ain’t givin’ you excuses, man, I’m givin’ you reasons!

Ordell: Oh, oh, oh, you gonna tell me the reason you lost every goddamn cent I got in the world?

@42, somewhere (far) behind the BJ Upton deal. It’s hard to compete with the worst contract in MLB history.

Look I do understand that the 2014 team as-constructed was flawed. It was still competitive up until the collapse though. Our farm system is barren mostly because all the good parts graduated to the majors. Aborting Wren’s strategy before seeing it to completion (seeing what happens in 2015, and trying to sign Heyward) is a slap in the face to the fanbase. It’s defensible, but the other direction is also defensible.

I don’t buy the rebuild for 2017 meme. We’re a decade away. The next stars for the next great Braves playoff team aren’t even in highschool yet.

I seem to recall Braves Journal was pretty united in being glad Dayton Moore was signed away by the Royals, because everyone agreed Wren was the better internal candidate anyway to fill JS’s shoes when he stepped down. Since he took over, Wren had done his job–build an annually competitive team on a limited budget, and he did so at the expense of the farm system (which was doing okay until several of the players moved up to the majors). And up until Medlen and Beachy fell apart at the same time, everyone around baseball seemed to think the Braves were in a good spot to compete for the next few years.

A year ago today, the farm system was not deep (okay, it stunk), but the Braves had the second youngest team in baseball and were considered contenders, which should have allowed a team to be competitive for awhile while focusing on rebuilding that system (although they would have had to pony up some free agent money to keep/get a corner outfielder after this year). Wren and Fredi got extensions, which seems to indicate the FO’s approval of the direction the team was heading.

Listening to local sports radio this morning…there’s a lot of off-the-record stuff coming out about how truly demoralizing the BJ situation was for the entire clubhouse. I assume you can also say the same about Uggla while he was here. Paying guys huge money to not perform would undoubtedly end up wrecking morale for everyone else no matter the organization or profession involved.

In my mind the right course of action was to just release BJ and Uggla before last season started. The money isn’t my problem. I don’t get enjoyment from Liberty’s managers hitting their bonus targets. I get enjoyment from watching my favorite baseball team. JS was team president for both those contracts, and he’s still team president. The new sheriff looks just like the old.

I love the trade. BJ sent packing. I honestly thought they’d never dump that contract.

Sad to see Kimbrel go and even more sad that he never got a chance to shine in October for the Braves. There is an alternate universe where the Braves had Mariano Rivera all those years instead of the Yankees and in that universe Atlanta’s playoff fortunes were much better in the late 90’s/early aughts. When Kimbrel came on the scene I thought they finally had their version of Rivera, but alas the rest of the roster was never great enough.

I’m young enough that I’ve never gone into a season as a Braves fan knowing they we not going to contend. I was pessimistic about last year, but knew they would at least keep it interesting for a few months. This knowledge of assured suckitude for the 2015 season is oddly calming. Here’s to beating out the Phillies for the NL sacko and getting a Kris Bryant-level draft pick next year.

Chipper was pretty scathing of Wren on Twitter last night, and he seemed to want to take on the collective outrage of Braves Twitter single-handedly. That was kind of interesting.

Also, I have not been so apathetic about Opening Day in my 20 years of watching baseball. Extended success has completely spoiled me. I thought I was ready to root for a losing team, but losing the chance to cheer for Kimbrel has taken the wind out of my sails (even though I never thought he’d still be on the team by the end of the year and I think the trade was a good one for the Braves, all things considered).

This would just be the icing on the cake, but I fully expect the Marlins to score two runs off of Jason Grilli this afternoon to start the season with a walkoff win.

Some of my fondest Braves memories come from watching putrid baby-blue-uniformed teams muddle through seasons where you knew they were going to finish last no matter what happened. You could buy a cheap ticket and sit anywhere, and pretty much everyone in attendance was drunk by the 7th inning. Ted Turner’s complete wacky-ness kinda helped I think. Now all we got is corporate malaise and Andrelton Simmons youtube videos.

I thought I was ready to root for a losing team, but losing the chance to cheer for Kimbrel has taken the wind out of my sails (even though I never thought he’d still be on the team by the end of the year and I think the trade was a good one for the Braves, all things considered).

@58 Peraza won’t be up til Sept, Ruiz might not make AAA. If the team was actually full of young prospects this year trying to find their way then ok, but it’s actually Jonny Gomes, Eric Young and Nick Markakis why exactly am I supposed to want to see them?

@71 Look that’s just patently false. The Phillies were one of the oldest teams in the league in 2011 and then signed everyone to major extensions well into their 30s. The Braves are/were one of the youngest teams (if anything they’ve gotten significantly older THIS YEAR) and sold off guys who are 25, 28, 27 and 28. If anything we would have lost Heyward and Upton to free agency and had an extra $25 million to spend plus a couple draft picks. Managment decided they’d rather dump all the salary they could and pocket the proceeds then sell the fanbase on a multiyear rebuilding project with no guarantee of anything except short term losses.

This is a team that won 96 games with the youngest roster in the league and voluntarily blew it up with no real imputus other than August/September 2014 being shitty. It’s really unprecedented for something like this to happen. Usually if a team enters a rebuild it’s because the stars are past their primes and they sell them off, this one the Braves traded stars in or entering their primes with no motive other than money.

The same team won the division the year before. That team wasn’t all that good either in the grand scheme of things, but good is a relative term. Hanging around .500 for four months with a chance to make the WC is “good” in some sense. Being 20 out before the break is going to be a lot different, and a whole generation of Braves fans haven’t experienced that side yet.

The 2014 Braves were garbage. They hung around after a hot start, which is different from being good. The 2015 season promises to be unpleasant, but don’t try and sell the 2014 team as a dynasty broken up before its time. They keep that team together, they win 85 games, maybe, and then it gets broken up next offseason instead with less to show for it.

There aren’t any guarantees in baseball. Every strategy is just playing the odds.

All true, but 85 wins might get you in the postseason tournament. Passing on that chance is a calculated risk, but from a fan’s point of view it will always rub me the wrong way. We don’t know that we got any pieces back from this offseason’s firesale that will be as good as what we sent packing. You can’t say that we weren’t even competitive with that group – the same position players won the division the year before.

Well, sort of — the 2013 squad had Chris Johnson’s career season and Brian McCann, who ain’t nothing. Their pitching was also significantly better than the 2015’s squad promised to be. (The Nationals also underachieved in 2013.) They doubled down on the 2013 roster once, and it didn’t work. Trying it again in 2015 is an all-or-nothing gamble, and one that requires 400 IP of starting pitching just for starters.

Regarding the Wren spite, I think trading his son from an org with no outfield talent and a need for speed was the strongest individual piece of evidence. I’m still not sure though–I like to think people are more complicated and less petty than that.

I think Wren managed to cobble together one of the most frustrating offenses I’ve ever had the misfortune to rend (Wrend?) my garments over. Yeah, I know SABR says K’s don’t matter to runs created, but it sure seems like they do when you watch the individual games and you watch the the side K’d with a runner on 3rd in the 9th.

@86, Hampton was hardly the worst–I actually thought it was a genius trade to get him for nothing with most of his contract being paid by 2 other teams. He was very good for us when healthy–that just wasn’t very often.

The messersmith deal was only 3 years and his problem was injury. If you’re going to cite that one, you have to consider the Nick Esasky deal. Esasky spent 2.9 of 3 seasons on the disabled list with vertigo

Hey guys! I haven’t been around in a while as I’ve been RV’ing across the East Coast. Back to normal so I thought I’d chime in:

1. The trade is a massive steal for the Braves organization. Kimbrel alone for those 4 plus draft pick would have been a good deal for the Braves. Adding MUJ’s contract makes it remarkable. Hart made Preller overpay, and we should all be glad. However, from a marketing perspective, the Braves just committed suicide.
2. This team can hover .500 if Fredi uses platoons right (he did today!). I don’t expect that to happen.
3. It’s easy to see if Braves are out of contention at the ASB that KJ, CJ, JJ, AJ, EYJ Grilli, Callaspo, Gomes, Maybin, Cahill, and Minor all get shopped and/or dealt if they’re finding relative success. That could be great news for the continued rebuild of this franchise.
4. Even mentioning that this year will be the Braves downfall for the next decade is so insanely obtuse that it’s not even worth arguing.
5. The Braves now likely have the 6th-7th best farm team in the Majors and many of those guys are in the lower minors. We could be looking at the best farm system in the majors before 2017.
6. Farm will continue to get stronger with 5 top-75 picks in July.
7. Braves will likely be bad for 2 years.
8. Braves will have a dynamic pitching staff for a decade starting next year.
9. Too many starting pitching arms are a great thing, and the entire system is chock-full of them.
10. 2 of our best relieving candidates for next year are recovering from Tommy John and should make a dynamic back end.
11. I really like Jace Peterson, and liked him far earlier than the bandwagoners (picked him as Brave #6 overall prospect over at Tomahawk Take and think he can be stellar, whether it be in a Super-Utility role ala Zobrist, or as a starting infielder).

Have hope, my friends. Buy the MILB.TV package and enjoy the Minor League Season as it will likely bring you more comfort than the MLB season.

I’ve been out of town for a week so when I read all the discussion about Dorn v. TP I just figured we had added yet still another player or coach that I didn’t know. After looking around for information about Dorn I finally found him… in the Braves Journal Glossary. I think it’s just about right.

You know Dorn, I liked you so much better when you were just a ballplayer. You were really great, once. If you wanna be an interior decorator now, that’s none of my business. But some of us still need this team. Now you listen to me! This is my last shot at a winner and for some of the younger guys it could be their only shot. I don’t know what happened to you. But if you ever, ever tank another play like you did today, I’m gonna cut your nuts off and stuff ’em down your f****** throat!

I can’t say I’m terribly excited about the 2015 Braves, but I rooted for them when they trotted out “studs” like Pat Rockett, Sugar Bear Blanks, and Tony Brizzolara, so lets go Jace, Nick, and Grilli. Baseball and My Braves are back. Hope springs eternal!

With Minor and Simmons on the DL, the Braves return 4 pitchers from the crew that tossed the horsehide last season.
Whatever Wren’s issues, signing expensive “dud” free agents and hollowing out the farm system remain the public legacy.

I always attribute famous baseball quotes to Branch Rickey;
Someone said, “I’d rather get rid of a player a year early than a year late”.

With impending free agents after this season, and the loss of 2 starters over the past winter, I’ll take my chances with the resulting “up the middle defense” rather than have to try this roster makeover during the 2015-16 offseason.

My take on the off-season is that the roster improved via subtraction of dead weight. How that translates into on-field performance we’ll see over time.

In talking to folks today, I was taken by the general level of sadness at losing Kimbrel, which I’m finding to be over and above that for any of the other moves. People really love that guy. As bad as the team was likely to be anyway, fans going to games would still have been treated to the occasional Kimbrel entrance. It’s always been a unifying experience, an anticipatory thrill that victory (delivered via utter domination) was soon at hand. Sad that it won’t happen again. Oh…uh, I hear the prospect is maybe good, and something something money something something…..

The makeover starts with this upcoming draft class. Every move made so far is, in all likelihood, a non-event. Shelby Miller might be great for a few seasons, but how good will he be by the time the 2015/2016/2017 draft classes reach the majors? Same with Teheran. Same with Alex Wood. We can’t win with this outfield, and there’s no obvious quick-fix there.

@111, Kimbrel is one of my all time favorite Braves. My dream of seeing him close out game 7 of the World Series for the Braves will almost certainly never materialize, and that makes me sad. But this trade might be the biggest coup the Braves have ever pulled off.

@113, you keep saying the Braves are now a decade away from contending. No team is a decade away from contending. Ever.

@116, contending by 2018 means that the current upcoming draft class produces guys as good or better than Heyward and JUpton and they rocket up through the minors. And all our pitching holds up and we have no unexpected injury setbacks.

It could happen, but it probably won’t. I’ll agree that it’s better to have the old-guard running the draft and the farm. But the policy of drafting low-ceiling college pitchers smells like something coming down from the very top rather than an evil-Wren thing. We’ll see I guess.

@118, there are many scenarios in which we contend by 2018 that do not require 2015 draft picks to produce anything by then. They also don’t require “all our pitching holds up”. We have a lot of pitchers, and only some of them need to produce something. They might all blow up, but probably not.

We probably will not replace Justin Upton and Jason Heyward unless we sign one of them. They were 2 of the top 15 outfielders in baseball. We might replace them with average players, though, while improving substantially at 2B, 3B, and CF relative to the 2014 club, getting better 1-5 starting pitching, and getting some offensive improvement at SS and 1B.

I don’t see how we have an abundance of pitching. We have more pitching prospects than we did at the start of the offseason, but really there’s nothing harder to predict than the fate of pitching prospects. I think we need a *ton* of things to fall our way in order to put a good team on the field when NCS@WFF opens for business. I’d rather have contended this year and then started the rebuild-through-the-draft plan a year later. Either way we suck for a long time, but doing it this way consciously punted on a season where we kinda-sorta-maybe had a postseason chance.

For the Braves to not contend for a decade would require that a) everyone currently in their system is a bust, and b) their next five or so drafts are all atrocious. This could happen, but it’s not particularly likely. Long streaks of irrelevance require ineptitude and cheapness on a massive scale, and the Braves are nowhere near that point yet. They already have more talent than the mid-aughts Pirates or Royals, which are the baseline for sustained awfulness in the wild card era.

Who’s the best position player prospect in the system? Peraza? All-speed little-guy who’s not going to going to have much of an impact as he rises through the system and plays against better defenses. Who is it after that? The new 3B guy Ruiz? I honestly have no idea. Our farm system is still barren as far as offense goes. We need *all* the pitching prospects to pan out so we can flip some for offense. It’s going to be tough.

I will not say the Braves won’t contend at all for a decade, I think that’s irrational. I will say they’ve guaranteed themselves nothing except short term losses and whether or not they’re the Nationals from 5 years ago or the Pirates from 20 years ago is anyone’s guess but all outcomes are in play.

@123, seriously, I’m as pessimistic as they come, but I think you’re making a lot of awfully negative assumptions. We might sign an ace pitcher in the next 3 years with the BJ/Uggla savings. I’d be surprised if mgt didn’t make a hard run at David Price and Jordan Zimmerman this fall. Players will come available in trades, and players will emerge in the minors that seemed like mediocre prospects to that point. Unless we cut our budget substantially, there are going to be multiple opportunities to improve our team that we can’t imagine at this point.

*Example, did you ever imagine we could trade for Justin Upton until it happened?

@126, Good point, but I’ve been trying really hard to not be a jerk lately

Our farm system is a barren desert. One-year’s firesale doesn’t really change that – though I’ll admit it helps a bit. You guys are blinded by the fact that our system has been a steady talent pipeline for two decades. That’s not the case now. There’s a multi-year bubble in this pipeline and it’s going to take longer than 2018 to fix.

The 50 years of baseball in Atlanta opening montage was pretty cool. Otherwise, the Braves broadcast has been really rough. The production team seems to have been caught off guard that 4:00 had rolled around.

The Marlins had the retractable roof open and failed to foresee the obviously totally unprecedented incident that is a popup downpour in South Florida. They began to close the roof as it started raining even though you could see the wall of water approaching the stadium like in a disaster movie five minutes beforehand. It takes several minutes to close the roof and in that time, the field got soaked because they didn’t have a tarp or anything to cover the plate and the mound, even…I mean after all, why would they? They have a retractable roof, of course. They don’t need any of that stuff! Now the field is a shit show.

Stuck at work but just turned on gamecast to look at the lineup. I see that Fredi is keeping with his “give the worst hitter the most ABs” philosophy. At least there’s one constant we can fall back on in these turbulent times.

Not even halfway through game one and already I am tired of Simpson and Caray’s banter about small ball, being aggressive, no strike outs, choking up on the bat, “good things will happen if you put the ball in play”, “pressure on the defense”, etc.

I wouldn’t have as big of a problem with “pressure on the defense” if they didn’t use it to explain why a five-pitch inning with three groundouts is OK, or why running into an out like an idiot is OK. Young breaking for the plate on that is “pressure on the defense” in a good way, but he knew he could almost beat it outright. If it’s a 50-50 proposition, then go for it.

The gist to me, of what Joe and Chip prattle on about, is to have a variable approach: as you get closer to striking out, emphasize the “drivability” of the pitch/swing combo less, and emphasize contact more.

That may not be best expressed by simply saying “if you put the ball in play, good things happen,” but it’s in there, and it’s true.

I’ve also never had any problem with Joe’s “use the whole field” mantra. People here reduce it to “it’s as if hits to right field are worth more than hits to left field,” but the actual wisdom in the words is, if you’re making solid contact to right field, you’re staying inside pitches, and staying inside pitches doesn’t preclude pulling pitches that are pull-able, and it allows you to hit hard pitches that aren’t pull-able. That is to say, if you’re hitting the ball hard to right, you aren’t pulling off pitches.

Again, that may not be best expressed by simply saying “use the whole field,” but it’s in there, and it’s true.

@257 The problem for me is their statements tend to lack all nuance or context. Yes, a lot of hitters should vary their approach with two strikes…but not all of them. Some sluggers you’d still rather try to slug. But the reverence with which they speak these holy utterances strikes me less as sophisticated critiques and more as mindless repetition of conventional wisdom that just happens to have a nugget of truth. Largely devoid of value, in other words.

@265 – If it works for Ted Williams, I’d think Jason Heyward might give it a shot. Not so much the pulling thing, as he famously pulled through the shift, but the variable approach. Ted Williams took a different approach with two strikes.

This is a scenario that will be photocopied throughout the season — scratching out a lead behind a good start, getting into trouble in the middle innings with the knowledge that a gas-can bullpen is a worse option than the starter throwing pitches 90-110.

Love the win today; lots of good moments to take away from it; and y’all are the best internet board there is. I can’t believe how much fun it is to read through 300 odd comments. Let’s do it again tomorrow.

But. It’s really chafing me–more with the print media/broadcast/front office spin doctors than here–to hear so much about changing clubhouse culture and approach now that they’ve moved some players off the team with the implication that Heyward was part of the problem. Heyward was part of a financial/roster problem, but he was the damn poster-boy for trying to manufacture runs last year and doing all the little things right. He stole bases without getting caught. He busted it down the line. He turned stupid balls and hard hit balls into outs. He struck out less than any of the regulars but Simmons. It was the other part of offense he had trouble with.

I’m sure I’m reading too much into it, but it’s really annoying that there’s a sort of company line where everyone has to pretend like everything about last year was shit and we’re on a better path now. Anyway. Good win today, Bravos.

Good win today. Now they only need to figure out how to do this 90 more times and they’ll have a special season. Not that I’m expecting it, but I’m holding out hope. I remember similar expectations going into the 1990 season.

Yes I agree @345 .. this offense will have alot of low scoring games but at least they will make the defense make the plays .. love to see some line drive hitting and opposite field hitting … I got way too tired of watching Uggla fan 3 times, Melvin BJ fan 3 times, Gattis fan 2 times, Heyward fan 2 times etc .. everybody up there swinging for fence … we are saving money now and will be able to get a couple power pieces after this year by trade ( with all the prospects we have now ) or by free agency …. I agree with what they have done .. I think Perraza is the future CF and we will upgrade with power at 3B and LF and be contenders .. IMO

@343, is it implied that Heyward was part of the problem? I think everyone knows heyward was traded because of impending free agency. I think it’s more the upton bros and gattis that ppl are thinking of–swing and miss guys

If you let Teheran eat innings the first few months and stick with the plan to provide an extra day of rest whenever possible, you're less likely to end up in a position where you may need to limit the younger arms down the stretch